Joey Abely

November 28, 2018

Dr. Drown  

English – 122

Habits of Joey Abely’s Mind

High school English class was a mess; teachers teach students to actively read and annotate an article by underlining half of the material, write in five paragraph essays, and never write in the first person. All of these were cemented into my head, a mindless memorization of going through the same process and same habits every day at noon when I had the class and when I got home to do homework. I was always sceptical about these methods as they were not feasible. I remember one time in highschool I was given an article to mark up in class and then write a short essay on. I started by annotating the text with the basic relevant information to answer the prompt, but the teacher quickly saw the minimal amount of underlining I did and demanded me to underline more. When it came time to write the essay my paper looked like it had been painted by Picasso; it was underlined everywhere and since my insisted in using different colors it was multicolored. I could not even focus on the words anymore it was ruined! When I entered my English 122 course this semester I suspected that I would learn about the exact same habits but those expectations were not accurate at all. Now we are encouraged to only annotate relevant information, ditch the five paragraph essay theme, and write in the first person. I honestly thought it was a joke when my professor said these things to my class but look where I am now; in college writing a final paper in nothing other than the first person! My habits did not work well at all as I was so used to doing everything backwards. I had to unlearn almost everything to be successful in this course and in my further writing endeavors. One of the only things that I was able to use was introducing a quote, stating the quote, and then explaining it, but that was only a minimal part of this class. Leaving the old rules behind and using the new seven habits of the creative mind was definitely a learning curve but I am now more confident in my english abilkities than I ever was before.